Peter Jackson: A Film-maker’s Journey

by Sibley, Brian

  I even remember details of my first-ever movie budget: four rolls of Super 8 film at $3 NZ a roll to buy and process; total cost $12 NZ. We screened it at school over several lunch times – it always got a big cheer when Mr Shoesmith exploded! – and we charged 10 cents admission. We made exactly $12! No going over-budget, but no profit either! But at least we broke even…

  Monty Python would continue to be a powerful influence on Peter and his love of ‘splatter that would eventually inspire his first commercial movies, was really borne out of a sketch from the third season of Flying Circus. Called ‘Sam Peckinpah’s “Salad Days”’, it imagined what might have happened if the American director of such uncompromising movies as The Wild Bunch and the then recently-released Straw Dogs had made a film of Julian Slade’s Fifties musical Salad Days.

  The result is an English country house-party that unexpectedly turns into a fevered gore-fest. Beginning innocently enough with someone playing a piano on a lawn and lads in blazers and flannels and girls in pretty frocks frolicking about to the music, things start going wrong when the bright young things embark on a game of tennis: someone is hit in the eye with a tennis-ball; a girl gets a racquet embedded in her stomach; another person’s arm is ripped off; the piano-lid drops, severing the pianist’s hands and causing fountains of blood to erupt from the stumps. Finally, the piano collapses in slow-motion, crushing everyone to death and the grisly debacle concludes with a shot in which, as the script tastefully puts it, ‘a volcanic quantity of blood geysers upwards.’

  It was Python at its most outrageous: defiantly unapologetic, even down to the on-screen ‘Apology’: THE BBC WOULD LIKE TO APOLOGISE TO EVERYONE IN THE WORLD FOR THE LAST ITEM. IT WAS DISGUSTING AND BAD AND THOROUGHLY DISOBEDIENT AND PLEASE DON’T BOTHER TO PHONE UP BECAUSE WE KNOW IT WAS VERY TASTELESS, BUT THEY DIDN’T REALLY MEAN IT AND THEY DO ALL COME FROM BROKEN HOMES AND HAVE VERY UNHAPPY PERSONAL LIVES…’

  I remember watching that episode on TV and being absolutely gobsmacked. Quite simply, it was the most extraordinarily funny thing that I’d ever seen. That sketch did more to steer my sense of humour towards over-the-top bloodletting than any horror film ever did! My splattermovies – Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles and Braindead – owe as much to Monty Python as they do to any other genre. It is about pushing humour to the limit of ludicrousness, the furthest and most absurd extreme imaginable – so extreme that the only possible response to it is to laugh because there is nothing else left to do!

  In 1975, Peter moved on to secondary education, attending Kapiti College, located north of Pukerua Bay at Raumati Beach, where he demonstrated an exceptional aptitude for maths, a complete lack of skill (or interest) in sport and where he was variously perceived by his peers, some of whom have described him as being painfully shy with an awkward stammer, as a boy who was so retiring, remote and self-effacing that he went all but unnoticed by teachers and fellow pupils. Others, who shared his passionate excitement for movies, saw beyond the shyness and the occasional stutter and found him an entertaining, intriguing, slightly eccentric character.

  ‘You would never have called Peter “a leader of men”,’ says one friend, ‘and yet we all followed him around! He came up with ideas, schemes and enterprises and we went along with them, took part, got involved. People have said he was reserved and lacking in self-confidence and he could, sometimes, give that impression – he rarely made vocal contributions in class – but he had massive self-confidence in his ideas and abilities. In that sense, you would not describe Peter as modest. I believe he always knew that he was going to be special, that he would have a charmed life…’

  To his close mates, Peter was often the joker: pulling stunts and gags. ‘He was totally lunatic!’ remembers Pete O’Herne. ‘We went into town one day and we got off the bus in Wellington and, as soon as it had driven away, Peter suddenly said, “Oh my God, Pete, where’s your bag?” I start panicking, thinking, ‘I’ve lost my bag! I’ve left it on the bus…’ And then I realised, for Christ’s sakes, that I’m actually holding the bag in my hand! And there’s Peter, laughing like hell!’

  There were also occasional trips to see a live taping of a TV comedy show: ‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ laughs Pete, ‘there we’d be in the audience – these guys from the loony-left, of the school of Python – watching some normal, mainstream comedy show that really just couldn’t do it for us! So, Peter and I would start hee-hawing away, making up the loudest, silliest, high-pitched laughs and crazy demented sounds. Then we’d watch the show on transmission and spot ourselves on the soundtrack which was easy because we were always way over the top for the kind of jokes in the show.’

  If the antics of the Monty Python team were shaping Peter’s sense of humour, he was also still in the thrall of the film fantasists. He had already discovered the American publication, Famous Monsters of Filmland that had been founded in 1958, three years before he was born and which was generally regarded by sci-fi, fantasy and horrorgeeks worldwide as being the bible on all forms of movie-monsterlife.

  In the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland, Peter read about the work of veterans Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Vincent Price as well as the Sixties stars of Hammer’s House of Horror, Peter Cushing and the man who would one day play Saruman the White, Christopher Lee. Behind-the-scenes features on the making of some of the great monster classics, fuelled his interest in special-effects while revelations about the tricks-of-the-trade of stop-frame animation and, in particular, the work of Willis O’Brien and the team who created King Kong deepened his appreciation for the movie-magic behind the Eighth Wonder of the World.

  In homage to Kong, Peter had toyed with attempting a possible ape movie of his own, building a gorilla puppet (using part of an old fur stole belonging to his mother), constructing a cardboard Empire State Building and painting a Manhattan skyscape for the backdrop.

  Peter’s first original monster was constructed around a ‘skeleton’ made from rolled-up newspapers and was what he describes as ‘a crazy hunch-back rat’ – a forerunner, perhaps, of the rabid rat-monkey that wreaks havoc in Braindead.

  More simian life forms were to exert their influence when Peter saw the 1968 movie, Planet of the Apes. The first – and unarguably the best – of a series of ape pictures, Planet was no conventional monster-movie. Based on a novella by Pierre Boulle, it had a satiric script, a seminal Sixties ‘message for mankind’, a compelling central performance from Charlton Heston and – for the period in which it was made – cutting-edge make-up effects that convincingly turned Roddy McDowall and others into assorted chimps, gorillas and orangutans.

  I saw Planet of the Apes on TV and was blown away by it. I loved the special make-up effects but I also loved the story. I was already a fan of King Kong – although my fascination is not really with apes and gorillas so much as with a couple of great movies that both happen to have apes in them!

  Nevertheless, both films, though they approach it in a very different way, have an intriguing theme in common: that the gap separating humans from apes is far less than we might like to suppose!

  It wasn’t long before Peter Jackson was sculpting and moulding ape-masks and involving his friend Pete O’Herne in the process. Pete, who still proudly owns and displays highly competent prototypes for their handiwork – albeit now incredibly fragile – recalls, ‘Peter’s imagination was such that if something impressed him, he had to try and do it for himself – filming, sculpting, whatever – and if Peter was doing it, you’d want to do it, too! We’d seen Planet of the Apes and I went round to his house the following week and he had a model head and was working on a face mask: sculpturing it in Plasticine, freehand – not using drawings or photographs but creating this thing in three-dimensions, from his own mind. Of course, I’d think, “I’ll give that a go as well…” So I did!’

  The process, as Pete remembers was time-consuming and expensive on pocket-money budgets: ‘Peter found this latex rubber in a hardware store; it came in little bottles that cost about $8 eac
h. Once we’d sculpted the faces, we’d just get little paint brushes and paint it onto the Plasticine; then we’d have to leave it to dry and then paint on another coat and so on until you’d built it up layer by layer into a skin of a reasonable thickness to work as a mask. Then we’d paint them and stick on hair that we’d chop off old wigs! Peter’s mother always helped out at school fetes and jumble sales and she’d always be on the look out for suitable stuff that we could use for costumes and

  I enjoyed sculpting in plasticine, and this was an early goblin design.

  make-up. The trouble with the latex was that it reeked of ammonia – a sickening, vomit-making smell!’

  The Planet of the Apes style film for which these masks were made never progressed beyond some footage of Pete O’Herne in an even more elaborate full-head mask made with a foam-latex product, which Peter Jackson purchased from a supplier in Canada and which he would bake in his mother’s oven. ‘It rose like a cake,’ says Pete, ‘but it also stank to high heaven!’ Existing photographs showing Pete wearing the gorilla head and a costume inspired by those worn by the ape soldiers in the film indicate a remarkable level of competence, although the setting – a domestic garden with a carousel clothes dryer – add a bizarre dimension!

  Although the ape film project never got beyond the idea stage, who could have guessed that the young man who was so fired up by Planet of the Apes that he created his own gorilla masks, would years later, as a professional film-maker, come near to adding a new title to the Apes franchise? Instead, Tim Burton re-made the original, and cinema audiences were denied the opportunity of seeing what Peter Jackson would have done with the theme of ape superiority.

  Now into his teens, Peter was broadening his knowledge of film with books about movies and moviemakers although, ironically, the students’ Film Club at Kapiti College – which seems to have been run by a smug, self-perpetuating oligarchy – repeatedly declined to accept the young Peter Jackson into membership.

  Undaunted, Peter pursued his interest in cinema alone or with friends like Ken Hammon, a fellow pupil at Kapiti College, who shared his love of movies, was a fan of Famous Monsters of Filmland and was, conveniently, another non-sportsman! Both boys had film projectors and were spending their pocket money buying 8mm copies of various movies.

  One of the first films in Peter’s collection was, unsurprisingly, King Kong, but he also owned prints of the original vampire movie Nosferatu and Lon Chaney’s versions of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera. Ken broadened the repertoire with such titles as D.W. Griffith’s silent epic, Intolerance, Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, Howard Hawks’ gangster movie, Scarface and the Hitchcock thriller, The 39 Steps.

  Other 8mm films were hired from a low-profile, illegal operator in the Wellington suburb who was able to supply such assorted delights as Dr Terror’s House of Horrors with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing which, Ken recalls, ‘freaked us out’, and Tobe Hooper’s 1974 seminal tale of murder and cannibalism, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Publicised in America with the poster slogan ‘Who will survive – and what will be left of them?’, Chain Saw Massacre was, for many years, banned in several countries including New Zealand so its illicit availability on hire was especially irresistible to the young film fans.

  ‘We humped four cans of film back home,’ says Ken, ‘watched the first reel, which was so psychologically unnerving that we were seriously rattled! I remember saying to Pete, “Are you really sure you want to watch the rest?” At the time we were hardly overexposed to such thrillers, so they inevitably made an impression.’ It was an

  My Uncle Bill visited us from England in 1976, and bought me my long-wished-for copy of King Kong in Super 8. In the days before video, projecting in Super 8 was the only way to actually own a movie and watch it again and again. Kong got played a lot in my bedroom!

  impression that, for Peter Jackson, would endure, as is testified to by the gorier sequences in Bad Taste and Braindead.

  In company with Ken and Pete O’Herne, or sometimes on his own, Peter was now regularly travelling into Wellington – or anywhere else that had a cinema and was within commuting distance – in order to catch the latest movie releases or fleeting screenings of vintage films.

  I saw American World War II movies for the first time – The Dirty Dozen and Kelly’s Heroes – and a film, made in 1970, about a much earlier war, Waterloo.

  Waterloo was the work of Russian director, Sergei Bondarchuk, and starred Christopher Plummer as the Duke of Wellington and Rod Steiger as Napoleon Bonaparte. It inspired an interest in that period of time which has remained with me across the years. I collected – and still collect – toy-soldiers, including a number representing various Napoleonic troops.

  What I loved about Waterloo were the uniforms and the big formations of soldiers. Filmed in the Soviet Union, Bondarchuk had used the Russian army as extras on the battlefield – 20,000 of them! I was impressed at seeing such a huge number of people on screen, but was also frustrated because the real Battle of Waterloo involved almost 140,000 soldiers, so I remember watching these 20,000 extras and thinking, ‘God! What would it be like to see the real battle?’ That’s why I wanted to create these formidable-looking armies in The Lord of the Rings which, with the aid of computers we were able to achieve.

  Ken Hammon offers an interesting perspective on Jackson the young cineaste: ‘People always talk about Pete’s obsession with horror movies, his fascination with gore and splatter, but they overlook another of his early cinematic passions that would certainly inform much of his work on The Lord of the Rings. Pete adored the wide-screen, three-hour historical epics that proliferated in the Fifties and early Sixties: Quo Vadis, Spartacus, El Cid, The Fall of the Roman Empire and the like. He loved these sprawling films with their great battles and thirty years later started making them himself, here in New Zealand!’

  I first saw Waterloo on its original release at the Embassy Theatre in Wellington and then, later, I dragged some friends along to see it when it popped up on a Sunday afternoon screening at a flea-pit of a cinema on the outskirts of the city suburbs which involved us in a train journey followed by a half-hour bus ride.

  I remember that particular day quite vividly because I had badly cut my thumb that morning. This is the sort of child I was…I had been reading WWII Prisoner of War books and I was intrigued by how, when they were planning an escape, they forged identity papers to show the various inspectors on the trains as they tried to make their way back across Germany to Switzerland. I was particularly fascinated by stories of how they would make fake rubber stamps with which to authorise the forged documents by carving them from the rubber soles of their boots.

  On this day, I’d decided to try this myself and was busy in my father’s shed in the back garden carving away at the rubber sole of an old shoe. The knife slipped and it nearly cut the top of my thumb off. It was a very deep cut, so bad that I still have the scar to this day. I should probably have gone to the hospital and had it stitched, but I wanted to go to the cinema to see Waterloo, which was only screening this one day. So I didn’t tell my parents about the wound – I just put a plaster on it and headed out the door. I remember how it throbbed like hell all the way to this terrible little theatre in the back of beyond, but that once I was there watching the film, I became so utterly absorbed in the action that I completely forgot the pain. As for the friends I dragged along to see it, I’m not sure that they appreciated it quite as much as I did!

  If Waterloo and other movie epics were to provide a long-term inspiration for the cinematic scope later achieved in The Lord of the Rings, the desire to capture on film the elusive magic of fantasy realms was reinforced by seeing the work of a master-moviemaker whose pictures became an inspiration and a touchstone for Peter Jackson. That man was Ray Harryhausen.

  A veteran stop-frame animator, Harryhausen was – and still is – a link with some of the greatest names in twentieth-century fantasy writing and film-making. Harryhausen’s friends
include the legendary futurist Ray Bradbury and Forrest J. Ackerman, founding editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland. A writer, actor and collector, Ackerman, at one time, negotiated with J. R. R. Tolkien to make an animated film of The Lord of the Rings and, years later, would make a cameo appearance in Peter Jackson’s Braindead.

  Ray Harryhausen had worked on the early animated films of key fantasy film director George Pal (The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine and many others) and, most significantly, was a direct link to Willis O’Brien, the special-effects wizard who was ‘father’ to King Kong, having served as first technician to O’Brien in 1949 on another Merian C. Cooper–Ernest B. Schoedsack gorilla movie, Mighty Joe Young. In terms of consummate skill in stop-frame animation – the ability to endow a puppet with emotions – Harryhausen was O’Brien’s unquestioned heir and his films made an immediate, and lasting, impression on the young Peter Jackson.

  Some of cinema’s most exciting and technically accomplished animated sequences appear in films to which Ray Harryhausen contributed as a producer, writer and/or visual effects creator. In titles such as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, 20 Million Miles to Earth, Mysterious Island, First Men on the Moon and the incomparable Jason and the Argonauts, Harryhausen’s fertile imagination conjured a cavalcade of dinosaurs, aliens and mythological creatures that entranced fantasy film fans over two and half decades.

  Two films, that Peter saw around this time were The Golden Voyage of Sinbad and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, but it was a 1975 re-release of the first of Harryhausen’s Sinbad movies that proved a pivotal point in his movie-making aspirations. The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, made in 1958, featured an amazing bestiary of inventive creatures, including a dragon, a goat-legged Cyclops, a two-headed Roc and a four-armed snake-woman!